Polly and Her Pals — September 27, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows Aunt Maggie's scheme: she has bribed Polly's music teacher to discourage her singing, paying him "a hundred berries." The teacher instead praises Polly's voice as "heavenly" — whereupon Aunt Maggie, with cartoon logic, concludes that "heavenly" and "unearthly" amount to the same insult, and flattens him. Sterrett's brushwork is confident and economical: bold stripes on the rotund figures, expressive sound effects, and speech balloons that carry the strip's sharp comic timing. Daily newspaper strips like this one — syndicated nationally, printed in millions of homes — established the panel-to-panel visual storytelling grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale by the 1930s.